Historically, floods have been known to carry away burial vaults. When floodwaters recede, burial vaults have been found far away from cemetery grounds, sometimes miles from the original burial site. It has heretofore been necessary to open such displaced vaults and attempt to identify the remains of the deceased and determine the exact location from which the vault was moved. Even if a burial vault is not moved, it is possible that burial records identifying the deceased could be lost over time, thus making it necessary to access the remains within the vault in order to attempt to identify the deceased.
Currently, it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify human remains and locate the precise place of interment. While DNA or dental records may be used for the purpose of identification, these methods can be time consuming and costly. Also, dental records and DNA samples may not be available to match the remains and it may therefore not be possible to identify the deceased.
Although some caskets or burial vaults contain exterior nameplates that identify the deceased, these nameplates do not provide complete identifying information, tend to decompose as a result of long exposure underground, and can become illegible over time. It would therefore be desirable to develop a reliable method for fully identifying the deceased contained within a burial vault and the precise burial location of the vault, without having to open the vault and examine its contents.
Information sheets have been disposed in some caskets to identify the deceased and the cemetery in notes made on the sheets. Some such caskets may be placed in a vault that is then buried and some such caskets may themselves be buried.
The known information materials are either placed directly into the casket or in a steel tube that is inserted into or affixed to the casket. For example, The Batesville Casket Company drills a recess into a casket and welds a steel tube within the recess. A scroll of paper is inserted into the tube to identify the deceased and cemetery. While these information materials are impressive and comforting at the time of interment, they may not provide a record that is relatively impervious to the elements and the passage of time. A steel tube deteriorates due to corrosion over time and the enclosed information materials may also be subject to relatively rapid deterioration.
A problem also occurs in that, compared to a vault, caskets deteriorate relatively quickly. Likewise, information materials contained within caskets may deteriorate relatively rapidly in response to deterioration of the casket. Also, the information provided by such materials may not be sufficiently precise to record the exact burial location of the casket, fully identify the deceased and provide a personal record concerning the deceased. And if any such casket is placed within a burial vault, the vault must be opened in order to access the information contained within the casket.
Thus, there is a need to provide a system, method and apparatus with archival quality records that can be easily accessed from outside a burial vault to fully identify the deceased, the exact location of his interment and perhaps even the nature of his personality and interests a century or more after burial.